Isolation and purification of high quality nucleic acids are critical steps in molecular biology procedures. A number of methods have been reported for the isolation of single and double stranded DNA from biological fluids such as human blood, serum, cultured cells, as well as plants, animal and human tissues, and other specimens. Many different procedures have been described (Taylor, J. I., et al., J. Chromatography A, 890:159-166 (2000); Ahn, S. C., et al., BioTechniques, 29:466-468 (2000); Scott Jr, D. L. et al., Lett. Appl. Microl., 31:95-99 (2000); Lin, Z. and Floros, J., BioTechniques, 29:460-466 (2000); Smith, C. E. and York, C. K., U.S. Pat. No. 6,027,945 (2000); Mrázek, F., and Petrek, M., Acta Univ. Palacki. Olomuc., Fac. Med. 142:23-28 (1999); Hawkins, T., U.S. Pat. No. 5,898,071 (1999); Su, X. and Comeau, A., Anal. Biochem. 267:415-418 (1999); Hawkins, T., U.S. Pat. No. 5,705,628 (1998); Davies, M. J., et al., Anal. Biochem. 262:92-94 (1998); Levison, P. R., et al., J. Chromatography A, 816:107-111 (1998); Rudi, K., et al., BioTechniques, 22:506-511 (1997); Kotsopoulos, S. K., and Shuber, A. P., BioTechniques, 20:198-200 (1996); Boom, W. R., et al., U.S. Pat. No. 5,234,809 (1993); Reeve, M. A., PCT Publication No. WO 91/12079 (1991); Sambrook, J., et al., In: MOLECULAR CLONING, A LABORATORY MANUAL, 2ND EDITION, 1.21-1.45 (1989) Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press); Shih, T. Y. and Martin, M. A., Biochemistry, 13:3411-3418(1974); Kothari, R. M. and Taylor, M. W., J. Chromatogr., 73:449-462 (1972); Astell, C. and Smith, M., J. Biol. Chem. 246:1944-1946 (1971); Weith, H. L., et. al., Biochemistry, 9:4396-4401 (1970). Most of these procedures are time consuming, tedious, and costly. In addition a number of these procedures involve the use of hazardous organic solvents. For example method described by Astell and Smith (1971) requires covalent coupling of oligodeoxyribonucleotides to cellulose. The procedure described by Kothari and Taylor (1972) refers to cellulose and various cellulose derivatives in which one or more organic solvents are used at various stages of nucleic acid isolation and they all require several purification cycles to isolate pure nucleic acids. Moreover, they found that the application of each type of available matrix is often limited to a specific group of nucleic acids.
Su and Comeau (1999) describe isolation of nucleic acid using cellulose and cellulose filter paper. They found that secondary fibril-associated cellulose (designated as SF-cellulose) can be used as a general-purpose matrix to isolate a wide range of nucleic acids. Their procedure, however, involves a complex treatment and conditioning step to prepare the cellulose matrix fibers prior to use for nucleic acid isolation. In addition, prior to the actual purification of nucleic acids, it requires preparation of a crude extract of nucleic acids from the sample into a solution containing detergents or chaotropic salts and removal of the precipitate by centrifugation at >12000×g for 2 min. The complex and lengthy procedure of the method described by Su and Comeau (1999) together with requirement for various organic solvents, make it a laborious and practically impossible technique to automate.